As much as it’s okay to be productive during the quarantine caused by COVID-19, there’s no problem about being unproductive as well.

As someone who easily gets anxious for being unproductive for consecutive days, it indeed pressures me a lot to be seeing people in social media doing different stuff to make their quarantine days a productive one.

Lately, I have been seeing posts online saying that quarantine is not a productivity competition.

At first, I found this statement ridiculous and I was puzzled. Because for me who had benefited a lot from the Enhanced Community Quarantine (for example, I was able to do my work-out routine on a daily basis even on weekends, I managed to clean up my cabinet, I got more quality time with my dogs by walking them around the village, or I even watered the plants every morning.) as I wear my ‘productivity medal’, this statement utterly sounded like an excuse.

Albeit when I put on my ‘empathetic medal’, I completely got to realize where this statement was coming from.

Indeed, it is worth bragging on social media about the tasks that we have accomplished during the quarantine. I have seen people on Facebook telling stories on how they learned how to cook or bake something, doing home work-outs. enrolling to online classes, etc.

But the thing is that you don’t have to always push yourself to keep hustling and do things that don’t interest you or you don’t feel like doing.

Quarantine is all about staying home and keeping yourself updated by watching or reading news.

Quarantine is not about forcing yourself to accomplish something. You should get to decide what is an accomplishment that is worth celebrating now. There are days when you want to accomplish something, and there are days when you just want to lie down and do nothing. And it’s okay.

Being stuck at home does not automatically mean that you are granted with free time, energy, focus and motivation to do things, because dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic alone and how the government officials response to it can already be draining.